Halo 3: Hands-on Review of the Biggest Game Ever (with Video!)

Halo 3 is an incredible game. Not that anyone was expecting a dud, of course, but our gaming guru has beaten the single-player campaign and has the full breakdown on graphics, gameplay, story lines, saved game functionality and more.

Halo 3: Hands-on Review of the Biggest Game Ever (with Video!)

Halo 3: Hands-on Review of the Biggest Game Ever (with Video!)

Let's get one thing out of the way: Halo 3 is an incredible game. Not that anyone was expecting a dud, of course.

And another bit of business to take care of, before getting into our hands-on review: Halo 2 was not incredible. Halo 3 is not an incremental improvement over that previous, record-breaking installment. Despite making $125 million in its first 24 hours, instantly attracting the attention of non-pasty, mainstream media types, and despite ending with an aggravating cliffhanger (think Matrix Reloaded, not Empire Strikes Back), Halo 2 is the weak link in the trilogy, and probably best considered as a development test bed for Halo 3.

Enough chatter, though—our review copy of Halo 3 is here, and we've played through as much of the campaign as the laws of time and space will allow. So just how incredible is the most anticipated game of all time?

Graphics

Graphics

It's a tribute to the previous Halo games—especially the original—that Halo 3's graphics don't feel like a revelation. The plot-driving cut-scenes look years behind the lush, luminous, pore-perfect glory of next-gen Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid. The characters' faces still look like animated corpses, the fabric on their uniforms still looks gummy and sculpted in place, and aside from the gleaming metallic surface of armor and most of the vehicles, the textures can look a little too smooth.

And to get even more specific, the character models in Halo 3 leave no shadows on the ground. Other than the flash of a nearby grenade or the glow of an energy sword, light sources tend to be uniformly bright and clear. Compared to games like Bioshock or The Darkness, the dynamic lighting is less extreme, and what shadows there are can seem shallow.

In other words, the graphics could be sharper, more detailed, more realistic—or even expressionistic. But that's always been the case with Halo. When Halo 3 is breathtaking—and it often is—it's because of the cinematography and art direction. A panoramic shot of a massive metallic ring punching up through the clouds is impressive because the lighting, a salmon and orange sort of twilight, treads the line between Passaic and alien. Similarly, when a character is silhouetted against dusk, the sky looks painted, not photo-realistic. And maybe most importantly, the angle, the camera movement—everything but the actual, physical performance of the CGI characters—is Hollywood-worthy, whereas most videogame cut-scenes are B-movie, at best.

The graphics during gameplay have a similar emphasis on cinematic choices, rather than an overload of showy effects or hardware-choking details. The craggy skin of a reptilian alien could look better when you're unloading both guns at point-blank range, but the view from the feet of a towering insectoid Scarab tank is unforgettable. As Bungie likes to point out, Halo is about driving, non-stop action, and the graphics seem to push already smart choices even further. Like nearly everything else about the game, Halo 3's graphics are effective, and always intentional.